WIP: Infect! Part III

Time to show some progress. Here are a few random shots.

Faces:

The main problem this model presents, other than a freaking amount of parts, is the fit: nothing fits as it should, everything needs heavy modifications!

Here is a shot of the base before said modifications:

                                        

Sakura's stand, modified because otherwise Sakura would be leaning too far back:

The inside of the base also needed some grinding, and later some puttying so that the "lid" could fit on the lower part:

And the clear part too got grounded quite heavily because no amount of heat I was able to produce would bend it  to shape:

Fitting Berserker's hair was a problem as there was too little surface for glue, so I had to go for creative pinning:

Filling the gap between brow and hair:

And Saber and Berseker on the base (never mind the terrible colors, there's only so much a cell phone camera can do):

WIP Eiko Yamato - part II

More than Japanese, she's Irish. More than Eiko, she's Erin...
Photo taken using my cell phone camera, and of course the flash light washed away all my efforts at shading. That's ok, you'll see it in daylight shots I guess!
She's wearing only half of her skirt as that's the only one that would stay on without pins, glue or sticky tack... I didn't want to risk the paint job when all I wanted was to check the general effect.
I like it for once! ^_^

Wip: Eiko Yamato - How to improve and paint clear resin

As you know, I've been spending time and energy on "Infect", Dark Saber and Kuro Sakura. However, there are moments when paints or putty need to dry and I can't do much, so I spend these times prepping or painting stuff I've had around for ages.
This is the case of this Eiko Yamato, which has been sitting on my desk for months, all pinned and primed begging for some attention (you can see her in the background of a lot of my shots).
So I painted her red hair (yes, mine is a red-head) and, since I had some left over skin tone paint from Sakura, she got some of that too:


This is my best pinning job as of today, the parts are actually held together only by pins (first time ever I manage to do that! ^^). Except for her arms, I puttied them to remove the silly bracelets that are supposed to hide the joints.

Today I decided to deal with the skirt of her costume, and to show you how I do it.
When dealing with clear resin, your best friend is Future Floor Finish, an acrylic wax sold everywhere in the world except for my country.



If you happen to live, like myself, in a country where it's not commercialized I strongly advise you to befriend someone abroad who might send you some, or to get some yourself as soon as you go on a trip! ^^
The one in the photo is the US version, the packaging and the name change from country to country. Here you find a lot of info about the product and the names you might have to look for:

http://www.swannysmodels.com/TheCompleteFuture.html

Anyway! At first I wanted to go for a pearly look and so I used some Pearl Ex Powder mixed into some Future. But I didn't like the result, it looked sort of cheap. Unfortunately clear resin, joy and pain, doesn't hold too well to stripping (or at least I couldn't get it as clean as I would have liked). Acetone might work, but it might also cloud up the transparency effect, so I'm not gonna try.
In the end, after some windex-rubbing, sanding and scraping, this is what the 2 parts looked like:



See how opaque and scratched up they are?
The first thing to do is to coat them with some Future straight from the bottle.
In this shot, the left piece has been coated in Future, the right hasn't. Can you see the difference?

In this photo, I coated the right part too. Not perfect, but much, much better!


Next, one drop of clear green in the Future already in my airbrush:

And a couple of coats later, this is the result:

Except for the time wasted stripping the previous pearl paint, it's a very quick process, it only took me 1/2 hour to get this result. This is also how I painted the clear parts on Berserker, except that there was a lot of masking involved so it took a little longer. In that case I used a little more paint to the mix as a totally clear body part is somewhat creepy, isn't it?

I might end up spraying a little thinned down gold to make the effect more interesting, or I might not, I don't know yet.

Now back to work on Saber and Sakura!

Happy New Year!